Her barstool was ripped down the middle, with duct tape stretched across it to contain the stuffing.
“Perfect,” Sloane said.
“Whiskey,” Albie said to the bartender, an older man whose expression communicated profound lack of interest. Albie glanced at Sloane. “Make that two doubles. Old Overholt, if you’ve got it.”
The bartender raised his eyebrows but turned away to pour them their drinks. Sloane took the pins out of her hair, lined them up on the bar in a neat row.
“I take it that proposal didn’t go the way you’d hoped,” Albie said to her.
“If this night had gone the way I hoped, there wouldn’t have been a proposal at all,” Sloane said.
“Then why the hell did you say yes?”
“There were five hundred cameras documenting every second of it,” Sloane said. “What did you want me to do, completely devastate and humiliate the goddamn Chosen One of Chosen Ones on national television?”
Albie considered this. “Fair enough.”
“Anyway, it’s not that I don’t want to marry him.” She paused and frowned. “Okay, I guess I don’t, but I have no idea why.” She groaned and put her head down on the bar.
“Ugh, okay, either the feet or the head have got to stop touching every surface in this place,” Albie said. He grabbed some paper napkins from the end of the bar and thrust them at her. “I feel like I might know why you don’t want to marry him.”
“Oh?” Sloane unfolded one of the napkins and wrapped it around one foot before balancing it on the rail again. It stuck there without difficulty. “Enlighten me.”
“Well,” Albie said, scrunching up his nose, “it seems like he doesn’t really know you, Slo. You aren’t squishy in the middle—”
“Technically everyone is squishy in the middle—”
“—which is okay. Many fine generals and responsible, emotionally distant fathers have also been un-squishy. We even call some of them heroes.”
“I’ve always wanted to be an emotionally distant father.” Sloane slid a napkin over on the bar and hit her forehead against it. “Fuck, Albie, what am I gonna do?”
“I mean,” Albie said, “you already know what to do, don’t you?”
Sloane sighed and looked at the ring she wore on her left hand, sparkling in the yellowish lights of the bar.
The bartender set two whiskeys down in front of them. They picked them up at the same time, then tipped them back in unison, both swallowing most of the whiskey at once.
“He wants me to just get over it, I can tell,” she said. “He feels like we all went through the same thing, so if he’s okay, I should be okay.”
Albie pressed his lips together and finished his whiskey. He signaled the bartender for another round.
“Do you think he’s right, that I should just . . . get over it?” she said.
“Well, if you figure out how,” Albie said, “let me know.”
She sipped the last dregs of her whiskey and stared at the array of multicolored bottles behind the bar. “We never talked about it,” she said hollowly. She meant the day she and Albie had spent as captives of the Dark One. The only day, of all the dark days they had endured, that neither of them ever mentioned.
“What’s there to say?” Albie said.
“Yeah,” Sloane replied. “He also told me to go to therapy.”
Albie snorted. “Therapy. Is that all anyone can tell us to do?”
“Didn’t help you?” she said.
“It did. And it didn’t. I don’t know. I just wish people would stop talking about it as if just going fixes everything,” Albie said. When he picked up his fresh glass of whiskey, his hands were shaking. He looked at her. “Why did you request those documents, Sloane?” he said. “It seems like it’s only made things harder.”
Sloane was quiet for a moment. “I’ve always wondered something,” she said. “I wondered if they found more potential Chosen Ones than just us. I know the criteria were specific, but there are like three hundred million people in this country alone, so—maybe there were a few others.”
“And this bothers you.”
She nodded. “What if,” she said, tilting her glass with a fingertip, “what separated us from them—what made us Chosen—was just that our parents said yes, and theirs said no?”
She remembered the conversation with her mother. The dim bedroom, with the heavy curtains closed. The clothes she had stepped on as she crossed the room to the bed. And the shape of her mother’s body under the blanket, curled in on itself like the dead bugs in the light fixture over the kitchen table.